Is This the Market of a Lifetime?

Years of harboring a gloom-and-doom outlook gave Jeremy Grantham,chairman of Boston-based as- set manager GMO,the reputation of be- ing a pcrma-bcar.Talk to him now, though,and the 70-year-old is almost     

Robust performance measures for high yield bond funds

We examine performance measures for high yield bond mutual funds, which are a considerable percentage of taxable bond investments, but have not been widely studied. High yield funds exhibit persistence in their monthly returns, so we calculate Sharpe ratios using methods that incorporate the serial correlation of returns. We find that high yield fund rankings using raw returns and conventionally calculated Sharpe ratios are different from those using trailing standard deviations and robust standard errors. High yield fund rankings based on robust Sharpe ratios also differ from those computed using multi-index Jensen's alphas and information ratios. When measured by risk-adjusted returns, high yield bond fund managers do not add much value.     

‘More is different’, exaptation and uncertainty: three foundational concepts for a complexity theory of innovation

Universities are engaging in more licensing and patenting activities than ever before, and the amount of research funded by industry is increasing. Academics’ commercialization activities may inhibit traditional academic scholarship. If the output of such scholarship is an important input into technological innovation and economic growth, then such an inhibition would be cause for concern. We introduce new instruments and techniques and demonstrate them using a novel panel dataset of academic electrical engineers from Stanford University. We find no evidence that engaging in inventive activity reduces the quantity of scientific output and some evidence that it increases its quality.     

Labour,leisure, poverty and protest: the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign as a case study

Social movements exist in a liminal space between labour and leisure. Movements require an inordinate amount of work – mobilising communities, studying policy issues, raising funds, organising events and participating in direct action – but protesting can also be fun. Demonstrations engender community through singing, shouting, marching and confronting authority figures. Activists often pass up typical leisure activities and take time off of work to protest. This article examines the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) to understand how people engage in both labour and leisure when participating in social movements. During the summer of 1968, a racially, geographically and politically diverse coalition of poor people caravanned to Washington, DC, and built a temporary city where they lived in wooden A‐frame huts for over six weeks in an attempt to expose poverty. Volunteers provided participants with social services and basic necessities they lacked at home, while participants conducted daily protests at nearby government agencies, demanding assistance for the basic needs of housing, food and jobs. While participants suffered under gruelling conditions – living in the summer heat and muddy conditions due to torrential rains – many have recounted how pleasurable the experience was. Most participants had never travelled beyond their home state, and the PPC provided participants with a free trip to the nation’s capital, three square meals a day, a chance to meet new people, and the opportunity to unite with other poor people and demand justice.     

Sport policy and development: an introduction

This article argues that the new Norwegian cultural policy, launched in the mid 1970s, strongly emphasizing cultural democracy and administrative decentralization, has had important unintended consequences. Stressing the value of activity as a crucial part of the new ‘comprehensive concept of culture’, the policy has supported exactly those tendencies it was meant to counteract, i.e. cultural standardization, individualism, privatisation and commercialization. The new relativistic and ‘anthropological’ perspective taking as a point of departure that we all ‘have’ culture regardless of social status, geographical setting and ways of life, implies that real planning becomes impossible, because nobody can argue from a cultural perspective that certain types of activities are more important than others. As a result the new local cultural administrations have to a large extent become service institutions for voluntary organizations.     

Policies for sustainable development in the hillside areas of Honduras: a quantitative livelihoods approach

In this article, we use data for 376 households, 1,066 parcels, and 2,143 plots located in 95 villages in the hillside areas in Honduras to generate information needed by decision makers to assess the needs and opportunities for public investments, and design policies that stimulate natural resource conservation. We develop a quantitative livelihood approach, using factor and cluster analysis to group households based on the use of their main assets. This resulted in seven household categories that pursue similar livelihood strategies. We use a multinomial logit model to show that livelihood strategies are determined by comparative advantages as reflected by a combination of biophysical and socioeconomic variables. While 92% of the rural hillsides population in Honduras lives on US$1.00/capita/day or less, households that follow a livelihood strategy based on basic grain farming are the poorest because they often live in isolated areas with relatively poor agro‐ecological and socioeconomic conditions. Opportunities for off‐farm work tend to be limited in these areas and household strategies that combine on‐farm work with off‐farm work earn higher incomes. Per capita incomes can be increased by improving road infrastructure, widening access to land, policies that reduce household size and dependency ratios, and adoption of sustainable land management technologies that restore soil fertility. We used probit models to show that the latter can be promoted by agricultural extension programs and land redistribution. Investments in physical assets should be directed toward households that pursue livelihood strategies based on off‐farm employment or coffee production, while agricultural training programs are best focused on livestock producers.     

An Examination of Mortgage Debt Characteristics and Financial Risk among Multifamily Properties

Using the 1996 Property Owners and Managers Survey (POMS), the authors (1) examine the mortgage debt characteristics of multifamily properties; (2) estimate the size and potential for growth of the multifamily mortgage debt market; and (3) examine the financial characteristics of multifamily properties, each with particular attention to differences by property size. While the authors find that the POMS suffers from severe missing value problems, their analysis indicates large differences in the likelihood that a property has a mortgage, the interest rate conditional on having a mortgage, and indicators of financial distress among properties of different size. They also find that smaller properties, with large potential for growth in multifamily mortgage lending, have much higher concentrations of low- to moderate-income tenants but that larger properties provide the bulk of units that serve these renters.     

AERPⅡ信息系统在A公司的应用分析

21世纪信息化的浪潮扑卷而来,企业作为市场竞争的核心主体,为了适应新的竞争环境与竞争模式,ERP已经成为企业迎接未来挑战和实现现代管理的必需品。因此,ERP信息系统逐渐被越来越多的企业所采用,并引发了企业在组织结构、业务流程及管理制度等各个方面的重大变革,也对企业的内部管理产生深刻的影响。文章以A公司的AERP信息系统为研究对象,分析其为什么要建立这个信息系统,建立AERP信息系统有何好处,它是如何在不断的改善中赢得竞争优势的,以便为更多的中小企业设计和应用ERP系统提供借鉴。     

It's Time to Move for School Bus

Links Following recent fatal accident,school bus checks kick off nationwide in China According to Xinhua news, twenty-one people, including 19 preschoolers and two adults, died and 43 others were injured when a nine-seat school bus illegally carrying 64 people collided head-on with a coal